Course Reviews community guidelines

Course Reviews on SEEK Learning

As part of our vision to help millions of Australians find their calling and guide them along their best career pathway, SEEK Learning now makes the education research process simple.

To help you make an informed choice about your education, we’ve created a place where you can read reviews about courses and institutions, written by current and past students across Australia.

Our community guidelines

To build a community of reviews in the spirit of helping others make choices about their education, all reviews and subsequent comments from education providers must follow our guidelines:

  • Respectful
  • Helpful
  • Authentic
  • Relevant
  • Non-commercial
  • Anonymous
  • English language only

Community guidelines in full:

  • Respectful - course reviews will not contain profanity, threats, violent references, sexual or prejudiced or aggressive or hateful sentiments or any other comment or language deemed inappropriate for our community. Similarly, any allegation of, or reference to, racism or illegal activity should be raised with the appropriate authorities and will not be published.
  • Helpful - we believe every course and institution will have both positive and negative aspects, so we ask that you present a balanced view of your experience. We want to help students find out what it’s like to study a particular course by avoiding reviews which are artificially positive or deliberately damaging. We may not publish your review if it is deemed to be malicious, biased, or suspicious.
  • Authentic - each course review must be related to first hand experiences of studying in a specific course and institution. Any review found to be fraudulent or duplicated will not be published. All content should be original and not quoted from other sources such as (but not limited to) other websites, social media, email, other reviews etc.
  • Relevant - the purpose of your review is to help others research various course and institution options in Australia, so all content should refer to the experience of studying the specific course in question. Any content deemed to be off topic, such as generalised discussion or relating to SEEK will not be published. Any reviews that reveal commercially sensitive information or intellectual property will not be published.
  • Non-commercial - any reviews promoting products and services of a company, containing URLs, email links or telephone numbers, or deemed to have been incentivised to be provided will not be published.
  • Anonymous – we believe each reviewer has the right to speak openly and honestly without fear of reprisal, so every review captured is displayed anonymously. Similarly, we won’t allow any review that names or identifies specific individuals in any way.
  • English language only – currently we can only accept reviews written in English. We don’t check grammar or spelling, and every review is displayed ‘as is’ without any editing.

Review dos and don’ts:

  1. Don’t highlight or call out individuals for either praise or criticism.

    OK:

    • “The teachers were excellent - very helpful and engaging.”
    • “The university teaching staff offer minimal support to online students.”

    Not OK:

    • “My tutor John was excellent. He explained everything very thoroughly.”
    • “The Lecturer of my Social Psychology class was incompetent and seemed uninterested in teaching.”
  2. Always be respectful.

    Our community strives to be a safe and inclusive place to share honest opinions. We will not allow hateful, aggressive or racist sentiments or language to be published. Any allegations of discrimination, bullying or harassment should be raised with the appropriate authority.

    OK:

    • “I think the testing policies and procedures should be reviewed as I think the system could be easy to cheat.”
    • “The course was not practical and I do not think it has helped to progress my career.”

    Not OK:

    • “As a female, I experienced a lot of sexual harassment. It was never addressed by the uni and I couldn’t complete my course.”
    • “My teacher seemed to hold a grudge against me because I was an international student and frequently belittled me in class.”
  3. Don’t make allegations of illegal activity.

    We’re not able to assess reviews for accuracy or verify facts or the extent of any allegation. Any allegations of illegal activity should be raised with the appropriate authority.

    OK:

    • “The culture of the university was questionable, I felt there was a lot of internal politics and not enough support for students.”

    Not OK:

    • “The uni is very biased and treats international students more favourably, even giving them higher marks on assignments.”
  4. Don’t reveal company secrets or intellectual property.

    Some information is privileged and important to keep private. Any information that is adjudged to be sensitive will not be published.

    OK:

    • “The university seemed to be struggling with the numbers of students.”

    Not OK:

    • “There have been discussions about lay-offs of teaching staff.”

How does moderation work?

We monitor all reviews to ensure they meet our community guidelines and are helpful to others.

Before being published, all reviews go through a moderation process:

  1. Reviews are filtered by screening software to ensure they are appropriate by detecting profanities.
  2. Reviews are read by our moderation team and evaluated based on our Community Guidelines.

I wrote a review, but I can’t see it on the website – why not?

If you wrote a review but can’t see it on the website, one of two things might have happened:

  1. We’re still gathering reviews for the institution or course you reviewed – we will only publish reviews when we’ve received enough to provide our users with a helpful view of the course or institution.
  2. There was an issue with your review – if your review did not follow our community guidelines, we won’t publish it. We do not let education institutions edit or delete the reviews that appear on SEEK Learning.

Need more information?

Have a question? Contact us [email protected] or check out the course reviews frequently asked questions, or SEEK Learning’s privacy policy and terms of use.